Determinants of Corporate Capital Structure: Australian Evidence

Carl Chiarella, Toan Pham, Ah Boon Sim and Madeleine Tan
Additional contact information
Toan Pham: School of Banking and Finance, University of New South Wales
Ah Boon Sim: School of Banking and Finance, University of New South Wales

No 3, Working Paper Series from Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney

Abstract: This study seeks to provide evidence on the importnace and significance of capital structure determinants in the Australian context. The analysis was implemented on a sample of 226 Australian companies from 1977 to 1985. The following results are obtained. Company non-debt tax shields display a negative relationship with respect to each of the debt ratios. This evidence is consistent with the theory proposed by DeAngelo and Masulis (1980) that firms with non-debt tax shields at their disposal can use these as substitutes for interest tax shields. The evidence canvassed also lends some support to the pecking order hypothesis of Myers and Majluf (1984). Specifically, significant negative relationships between profitability and all debt ratios are found. The implication is that the sample of firms studied prefer to finance investments with internally retained funds before issuing debt. Some evidence of a size effect is present and this indicates that the larger firms in the sample tended to employ more debt in their capital structures. The positive relationship between cash holdings and debt ratios indicates some support for the free cash flow hypothesis of Jensen (1986), although these estimates are not significant. No support for the growth opportunity and collateral value attributes as determinants of deb ratios can be discerned, consistent with Titman and Wessels (1988).

Pages: 42 pages
Date: 1991-06-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published as: Chiarella, C., Pham, T., Sim, A. B. and Tan, M. 1992, "Determinants of Corporate Capital Structure: Australian Evidence", in G.S. Rhee and R. P. Chan, Pacific Basin Capital Markets Research, Vol. III, North Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 139-158.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.finance.uts.edu.au/research/wpapers/wp3.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.finance.uts.edu.au:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uts:wpaper:3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Duncan Ford ().